CHAPTER IV

THE JOURNEY THROUGH TEXAS
AND THE BACK COUNTRY

1854

The Letters in This Chapter, which Olmsted wrote while traveling in Texas from January through May 1854, deal with the three concerns that were then most immediate for him. One was the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and its implications for the relationship of the South to the rest of the country. Another was his delight with the German settlements near San Antonio and with the friends he made while visiting them. A third was the exciting prospect of the creation of one or more free states in West Texas. The letter from Olmsted’s “The Southerners at Home” series for the New York Daily Tribune presents the one passage from that series that he did not publish in virtually identical form in A Journey in the Back Country. The chapter closes with two of the letters that he and his brother wrote in early October 1854 as they solicited funds with which to aid their new friend Adolf Douai and his antislavery newspaper, the San Antonio Zeitung.